For All of Our Children: Justice Thurgood Marshall’s Faith in Integration Is Still Right
We deal here with the right of all of our children,
whatever their race, to an equal start in life and to an
equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens.
–Justice Thurgood Marshall, dissenting, Milliken v. Bradley (1974), p.783.
Justice Thurgood Marshall was convinced that, for all children to be “our” children, it would require people to engage meaningfully across racial lines and other lines of difference. In his dissent in Milliken v. Bradley, he lamented:
Those children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future. Our Nation, I fear, will be ill-served by the Court’s refusal to remedy separate and unequal education, for unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will ever learn to live together. (Milliken, 1974, p.783)
The vision of our children—where all children in this country would have the freedom to thrive and reach their potential regardless of racial background—still feels far away in 2024, seventy years after Brown and fifty years after Milliken.
Our goal in this commentary is to share research from the social sciences and legal scholarship that supports Justice Marshall’s conviction that genuine cross-group engagement is a critical step for people across race (and other group-based identities) to hold each other in a shared circle of concern and do the work that will create equal opportunities for all to reach their full potential. We describe the mixed legacy of school integration efforts after Brown to achieve the cross-racial community that Marshall envisioned. We also explain and endorse Michelle Adams’ conception of “radical integration” as a goal for fulfilling Marshall’s aspiration. Finally, we highlight empirical research supporting the notion that integrating schools, under conditions of inclusion, cooperation, and respect, would facilitate the kinds of cross-racial understandings and relationships to which Marshall aspired.